Summer holidays

[Alex Mitchell]

Every summer we would spend the school holidays visiting my Gran in England, taking the bus down to the seaside to eat ice cream and cucumber sandwiches in the shadow of the pier. And every Sunday the entire family would head over to Auntie Sarah and Uncle John's house in the New Forest for roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts and Yorkshire pudding. Visiting now brings a strange mixture of nostalgia and sadness: so many empty seats around the table, but Auntie Sarah's apple rhubarb crumble still tastes exactly the same after so many years.

"I remember the last time this happened", she said, and it took me a moment to realise she was talking about the internet outage. "It was so hot that summer that the beach was closed and we all had to stay inside. For almost a week, there was no television or radio. We joked about how we had become so dependent on the telly that nobody could remember how to read the newspaper. But it quickly passed, and nobody ever explained what happened. Uncle John always said it was because of Sellafield, but you know how he always told stories. Anyway the plant wasn't opened until later that year. I just finished my O-levels and started working at the plant before Christmas. That's where I met your uncle."

Looking over at the seat where Uncle John would sit and tell us his tall tales about his work, I wished I had paid more attention to those stories. Now all that was left were the Spitfire and Lancaster models on the mantelpiece he had so lovingly painted by hand, a photo we took together in the carpark outside the plant's security gates when I was 9 years old, and my rapidly fading memories.

When the network came back later that week I tried googling Sellafield and the great TV and radio outage, but all I could find were stories about the wet, dull summer of 1956, nothing like the monstrous weather that Auntie Sarah remembers.